Testing of Illicit Drugs in Seized Materials and Biological Specimens

Guidance for th

Driving continuous improvement

The quality of improvement depends on the quality of leading and lagging performance indicators. For this reason, several tools, such as process mapping, cause and effect analysis and FMEA, need to be used in an integrated way with performance measurement models, such as balanced scorecard, integrated performance measurement system, performance prism and so on. However, in our experience, this alone is not quite enough due to the amount of effort required to monitor performance indicators at operational levels. The authors find that IT support is key to the successful implementation of performance measurement-driven continuous improvement schemes

Continuous Improvement in Education

In recent years, 'continuous improvement' has become a popular catchphrase in the field of education. However, while continuous improvement has become commonplace and well-documented in other industries, such as healthcare and manufacturing, little is known about how this work has manifested itself in education.This white paper attempts to map the landscape of this terrain by identifying and describing organizations engaged in continuous improvement, and by highlighting commonalities and differences among them. The findings classify three types of organizations engaged in continuous improvement: those focused on instructional improvement at the classroom level; those concentrating on system-wide improvement; and those addressing collective impact. Each type is described in turn and illustrated by an organizational case study. Through the analysis, six common themes that characterize all three types of organizations (e.g., leadership and strategy, communication and engagement, organizational infrastructure, methodology, data collection and analysis, and building capacity) are enumerated. This white paper makes four concluding observations. First, the three case studies provide evidence of organizations conducting continuous improvement work in the field of education, albeit at different levels and in different ways. Second, entry points to continuous improvement work are not mutually exclusive, but are nested and, hence, mutually informative and comparative. Third, continuous improvement is not synonymous with improving all organizational processes simultaneously; rather, research and learning cycles are iterative and gradual in nature. Fourth, despite being both iterative and gradual, it is imperative that improvement work is planned and undertaken in a rigorous, thoughtful, and transparent fashion

A study into continuous improvement initiative sustainability

The idea of continuous improvement is familiar to most managers and there are many examples of how its use can increase a company’s overall performance. However, while numerous companies have adopted the approach, very few have seen the long term sustainability of such programmes. This paper reports on research that was carried out into the sustainability of continuous improvement initiatives. A case study was carried out in a manufacturing company that had been using the approach for five years. The case study identified several factors that helped to sustain the initiative but it also revealed some elements that had a negative impact

Continuous Improvement Through Knowledge-Guided Analysis in Experience Feedback

Continuous improvement in industrial processes is increasingly a key element of competitiveness for industrial systems. The management of experience feedback in this framework is designed to build, analyze and facilitate the knowledge sharing among problem solving practitioners of an organization in order to improve processes and products achievement. During Problem Solving Processes, the intellectual investment of experts is often considerable and the opportunities for expert knowledge exploitation are numerous: decision making, problem solving under uncertainty, and expert configuration. In this paper, our contribution relates to the structuring of a cognitive experience feedback framework, which allows a flexible exploitation of expert knowledge during Problem Solving Processes and a reuse such collected experience. To that purpose, the proposed approach uses the general principles of root cause analysis for identifying the root causes of problems or events, the conceptual graphs formalism for the semantic conceptualization of the domain vocabulary and the Transferable Belief Model for the fusion of information from different sources. The underlying formal reasoning mechanisms (logic-based semantics) in conceptual graphs enable intelligent information retrieval for the effective exploitation of lessons learned from past projects. An example will illustrate the application of the proposed approach of experience feedback processes formalization in the transport industry sector

Effective Assessment Plan Leading to Strong Reform of Petroleum Engineering Graduate Program

The Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering at Texas Tech University has made a lot of significant actions of improvement to its graduate program that was motivated by a systematic SACSCOC assessment plan. This paper shows how the SACSCOC assessment plan aided in making continuous actions of improvement and as a conclusion of these actions, how the current graduate curriculum plan was improved. This paper highlights the details of the graduate department assessment plan, such as how graduate program objectives are assessed, what assessment tools are used, when data are gathered and evaluated, and when actions of improvement are made. This paper will also detail how the analysis of data was utilized in making actions of continuous improvement. At the end of the paper examples of the significant actions of improvement made based on the department assessment and evaluation plan are presented.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Continuous-variable teleportation improvement by photon subtraction via conditional measurement

We show that the recently proposed scheme of teleportation of continuous variables [S.L. Braunstein and H.J. Kimble, Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 869 (1998)] can be improved by a conditional measurement in the preparation of the entangled state shared by the sender and the recipient. The conditional measurement subtracts photons from the original entangled two-mode squeezed vacuum, by transmitting each mode through a low-reflectivity beam splitter and performing a joint photon-number measurement on the reflected beams. In this way the degree of entanglement of the shared state is increased and so is the fidelity of the teleported state.Comment: 7 pages REVTeX, 7 figure